Half the joy of Ridley Scott’s miraculous sophomore film is watching Weaver ascend from the film’s pack of charismatic character actors to become a movie icon in under two hours.

| Mar 5, 2025

Combined with the brilliant visual aesthetic, impeccable production design, and great performances from top-to-bottom, Alien has few equals in cinematic history.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Aug 17, 2024

Like so many great sci-fi films of the era, it leaves those to the imagination in favor of character and story.

| Jul 5, 2024

Human beings mostly die in the order of how much they acquiesced to the company without complaint, and even the robot and alien are not immune. Only the rebel, Ripley, and Jonesy, a cat who is the embodiment of a being who is never subservient, survive.

| Jun 14, 2024

A masterpiece of sci-fi horror.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 28, 2024

A towering technical achievement; an all-time Final Girl; creature design for the gods. Alien is the complete package. 5/5 - no notes.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 22, 2024

The beauty, the scale, and the artistic vision Scott brings to Alien go beyond filmmaking and into the ambitious realm of myth-making that burned a permanent, glorious scar on the memory and psyche of the world.

| May 2, 2024

Still a masterpiece of slow-burning dread and terror.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 26, 2024

Simply one of the best at being terrifying with the random unknown disconnected from any necessary lore.

| Jan 18, 2024

Alien will scare the peanuts right out of your M&M's. It was about time someone made a science-fiction thriller that thrills... and just boils everything down to the pure, ravishingly vulgar essence of fright.

| Nov 16, 2023

This thing scared the shit out of me. Alien's a masterpiece of fright.

| Nov 16, 2023

It is space in raw, horrifying terms. It is primitive, stricken, painful. And it is terrifying in the way that Edgar Allen Poe's horror stories are terrifying -- the physical reaction transcends the words, or, in this case, the images.

| Nov 16, 2023

You can have Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 2001. I'll take Alien.

| Nov 16, 2023

Ridley Scott's Alien is simply extraordinary. It's as spectacular as horror thrillers ever get.

| Nov 16, 2023

Miss Weaver, a New York actress making her film debut, makes the most of the opportunity without overdoing it. She suggests toughness and fear in equal measure.

| Nov 16, 2023

The most intriguing aspect of the film is actress Sigourney Weaver, who cuts quite an imposing figure as the one intelligent member of the ship's crew besides the monster.

| Nov 16, 2023

Ridley Scott's new film Alien, destined to become the scary smash of summer, returns us to our senses. Our bad dreams [about extraterrestrials] were right.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 16, 2023

Alien, like the Exorcist, works on your nerves and emotions with the practiced hand of a torturer extracting a confession. The movie is terrifying, but not in a way that is remotely enjoyable.

| Nov 16, 2023

You are in for jolts, shocks and some fairly gruesome and shuddering sights. With only his second feature, Ridley Scott has emerged as a major film maker. What he has to say is still not clear, but he certainly knows how to say it effectively.

| Nov 16, 2023

There are no moral choices, no Deer Hunter ambiguity or Midnight Express propaganda. There is only the quandary over whether to stick it out until the end, edge of the seat and all, or bolt for the exits and a dreamless sleep. Alien is very scary.

| Nov 16, 2023